Mikel gorbachev biography

(1931-2022)

Who Was Mikhail Gorbachev?

Mikhail Gorbachev became a delegate to the Communist Party Congress in 1961. He was elected general secretary in 1985. He became the first president of the Soviet Union in 1990 and won the Nobel Prize for Peace that same year. He resigned in 1991 and founded the Gorbachev Foundation. He remained active in social and political causes throughout the remainder of his life.

Early Life

Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was born on March 2, 1931, to a Russian-Ukrainian family in the village of Privolnoye, in the Krasnogvardeisky District near the Stavropol Territory of southern Russia.

Gorbachev’s parents were peasants. His father, Sergei, operated a combine harvester for a living. Sergei was drafted into the Russian Army when the Nazis invaded the USSR in 1941. Three years later, he was wounded in action and returned home to resume operating farm machinery. Sergei passed on his experience to his young son, Mikhail. Mikhail G

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Mikhail Gorbachev: The Soviet leader who helped end the Cold War

Gorbachev remained a strong critic of President Vladimir Putin, who he accused of running an increasingly repressive regime.

"Politics fryst vatten increasingly turning into kopia democracy, said Gorbachev, "with all power in the hands of the executive branch."

However, in 2014, Gorbachev defended the referendum that led to Russia's annexation of Crimea.

"While Crimea had previously been joined to Ukraine based on the Soviet laws, which means party laws, without asking the people," Gorbachev declared, "now the people themselves have decided to correct that mistake."

On Gorbachev's 90th birthday in March 2021, President Putin praised him as "one of the most outstanding statesmen of modern times who made a considerable impact on the history of our nation and the world".

And Gorbachev's own views of his legacy? It was right to end the totalitarian struktur and the

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The Public and Private Mikhail Gorbachev

MEREDITH HINDLEY: You’ve written extensively about Soviet history, including biographies of Nikita Khrushchev and Mikhail Gorbachev. How and when did your fascination with the USSR begin?

WILLIAM TAUBMAN: It began when I was a kid in the 1950s. I was a news junkie and followed Cold War developments with fascination, especially relations between Eisenhower and Khrushchev and Kennedy and Khrushchev. Who knew that I would eventually write Khrushchev’s biography? My mother’s family had immigrated to the U.S. from Russia in 1905, and although she had rejected Russian in her effort to become a “real American,” her parents spoke Russian and talked a lot about the USSR, so I think that, too, must have motivated me. One other formative factor: I knew that the Soviet Union identified itself as a Marxist state that was building a glorious future, but that, under Stalin, it had turned into a killing ground. I wanted to try to figure out why and how